Ride the Star Winds

by A Bertram Chandler

  He took the elevator down to the after airlock, walked down the ramp to the cracked and scarred concrete. His first lieutenant, Lieutenant Commander Cummings, saluted smartly. Grimes returned the salute. He said, “I’m taking a morning stroll, Commander Cummings. To the old seaport.”

  “Shouldn’t an armed party be going with you, sir? After all, according to the data, the natives aren’t overly friendly towards visitors.”

  “I’ve been here before, Commander. And the ones who most certainly were not friendly were the human colonists. And, as you know, they were resettled.”

  “As you please, sir. But . . .”

  “I shall be all right, Commander.”

  You always are, you old bastard, he could almost hear the officer thinking.

  And—old bastard? he thought. Yes, he was getting old. Not in mind, not even in body, but in years and experience.

  The road from the spaceport to the seaport, along which he had first walked so many years ago, was still passable. Nonetheless he began to wish that he had taken one of the ship’s boats instead of making the journey by foot. At any age at all he did not enjoy having to force his way through bushes. Although the sunlight was not especially hot he had worked up a good sweat by the time that he got to what had been Salem City. The charred ruins were not yet completely overgrown and the church and the hall, in which the colonists had taken refuge, were still standing.

  Like rotting fangs the jetties still protruded into the sullen sea, from which projected, at crazy angles, the fire-blackened spars that had been the masts and yards of the schooners.

  The slipway, still in a good state of repair, was almost as he remembered it.

  And up it walked Seiko.

  She was as she had been when he first saw her, in his parents’ home. The transparent, glassy skin had been cleaned of all vestiges of body paint and beneath it glittered the beautiful intricacy of that non-functional yet busy clockwork. Her well-shaped head was bare of the last trace of hair. But something had been added, one item of clothing. She wore a broad belt of gleaming metal mesh with a golden buckle—more shield than buckle—that covered her navel.

  She bowed formally. “Captain-san.”

  He bowed in return. “Seiko-san.”

  She said, “This is Liberty Hall. You can spit on the mat and call the cat a bastard.”

  He laughed and said, “You haven’t lost your sense of humor.”

  “Why should I have done so, John? The silkies are not a humorless people.”

  She looked intently at his cap badge, the braid on his shoulders.

  Grimes asked, “What’s puzzling you?”

  She said, “Your ship is the same. I saw her coming down. But your uniform is different.”

  Grimes told her, “She is no longer my ship. Oh, I command her, but I no longer own her. And her name has been changed. She is now Faraway Quest, the survey vessel of the Rim Worlds Confederacy, in whose naval reserve I hold the rank of commodore.”

  “And all the people I knew, when she was Sister Sue and you were owner as well as captain?”

  “They have all gone their various ways, Seiko.”

  “I would have liked to have met Shirl and Darleen again . . .”

  “I still hear from them, about once a standard year. Eventually they returned to their home planet, New Alice.”

  “When next you write, please give them my regards.”

  “I shall do so.”

  “And when next you are on your home planet, John, please give my regards to your respected parents.”

  Grimes told her, regretfully, “They are both long gone.”

  “Then will you, for me, make obeisance at their tomb and pour a libation?”

  “I shall do that,” promised Grimes.

  The pair of them fell silent, looking at each other, a little sadly. It was a companionable silence.

  Grimes broke it. He said, “You can have your old job back, if you want it.”

  She replied, “Thank you. But the silkies still need me. I am their hands and their voice. I speak for them to the occasional visitors to this world, human and non-human. Were I not here there would be acts of aggression and exploitation.”

  “So that’s the way of it,” said Grimes.

  “That is the way of it,” she agreed. Surprisingly she took him in her strong arms, affectionately pressed him to her resilient body. Grimes did not resist. She released him. “Good-bye, John. You must return to your ship. To your ship. We may meet again—I hope that we do. We may not. But always, always, the best of luck.”

  She turned away from him, walked down the slipway to the sea, an almost impossibly graceful, glittering figure. It seemed to Grimes that the silkies had been waiting for her. There was a great flurry of spray as she entered the water, a chorus of musical gruntings.

  And then she and they were gone, and Grimes started his walk back to the ship, cursing the spiky bushes on the overgrown road that seemed to be determined to hold him prisoner on this planet.

  He was sitting in his chair in the control room. The Drive had been recalibrated. All hands had returned on board, had proceeded to their lift-off stations. Steerforth looked curiously at Grimes’s forearms, bare under the short-sleeved uniform shirt, at his knees, bare under the hem of his shorts.

  “Those scratches, sir. . . . How did you get them? You look as though you’ve been in a cat fight.”

  “Do I?” said Grimes coldly. Then, “All right, Number One. Let’s get the show on the road.”

  Steerforth said, “But couldn’t we wait a little, sir? What about Seiko? Couldn’t we send Shirl and Darleen down to the sea to try to do some submarine singing to call her back? After all, they’re rather special cobbers of hers.”

  “We shall be happy to try,” said Shirl.

  “Make it lift-off stations, Mr. Steerforth,” ordered Grimes.

  “But Seiko . . .”

  “She’ll be all right,” said Grimes, with convincing certainty.

  CATCH THE

  STAR WINDS

  Chance Encounter

  We paid off on Faraway, having brought the old Epsilon Pavonis all the way across the Galaxy to hand her over to her new owners, Rim Runners Incorporated. The Commission’s Branch Manager booked us in at the Rimrock House, one of the better hotels in Faraway City. All that we had to do was to wait for the arrival of Delta Bootes, in which vessel we were to be shipped back to Earth. The services to and from the Rim Worlds are far from frequent and none of the big passenger liners ever call there; they are not planets that one would ever recommend for a vacation. There’s that dreariness, that ever-present sense that one is hanging by one’s eyebrows over the very edge of the ultimate cold and dark. The cities on none of the Rim Planets are cities, real cities, but only overgrown—and not so very overgrown at that—provincial towns. The people are a subdued mob who take their pleasures sadly and their sorrows even more sadly. Somebody once said that the average Rim World city is like a graveyard with lights. He wasn’t so far wrong.

  Delta Bootes was a long time coming. She was delayed on Waverley by a strike, and then she had to put in to Nova Caledon for repairs to her Mannschenn Drive unit. Some of us didn’t worry overmuch—after all, we were being paid, and well-paid, for doing nothing and the branch manager was footing our weekly bar bills without a murmur. Some of us worried a lot, even so. In the main, with one exception, it was the married men who were doing the worrying.

  The one exception was Peter Morris, our P.R.O.—Psionic Radio Officer to you—our bright young man from the Rhine Institute, our tame telepath. Yet he was single and so far as any of us knew, had no girl waiting for him on any of the colonised worlds or on Earth. But if there had been a first prize for misery he would have won it.

  I liked Peter. During the run out we had formed a friendship that was rather unusual between a telepath and a normal human being—or, as the average graduate of the Institute would put it, between a normal human being and a psionic deficient. I liked Peter
, I suppose, because he was so obviously the odd man out and I have a strong tendency towards being odd man out myself. So it was that during our sojourn on Faraway we developed the routine of leaving the others to prop up the bar of the Rimrock House while we, glad to get away from reiteration of the bawdy jokes and boring personal anecdotes, wandered away from the hotel and through the city, finding some small, pleasant drinking place where we could sip our beer in relative peace and quiet.

  We were in such a place that morning, and the drinks that we had imbibed had done nothing at all to cheer Peter up. He was so gloomy that even I, who am far from being a cheerful type myself, remarked upon it.

  “You don’t know what it’s like, Ken,” he told me. “As a psionic deficient you’ll never know. It’s the aura of . . . of . . . Well, there’s fear, and there’s loneliness, and a sort of aching emptiness, and together they make up the feel of these Rim Worlds. A telepath is always lonely until, if he’s very lucky, he finds the right woman. But it’s so much worse here.”

  “There’s Epstein, the P.R.O. at the port,” I said. “And there’s Mrs. Epstein. Why don’t you see more of them?”

  “That,” he declared, “would make it worse. When two telepaths marry they’re a closed circuit to an extent that no p.d. couple can ever be . . .” He drank some more beer. “Finding the right woman,” he went on, “is damned hard for us. I don’t know why it is, but the average Esper female is usually frightfully unattractive, both mentally and physically. They seem to run to puddingy faces and puddingy minds . . . You know, Ken, I needn’t have come on this trip. There are still so few of us that we can afford to turn down assignments. I came for one reason only—just hoping that by making a voyage all the way across the Galaxy I’d find somebody.”

  “You still might on the way back,” I told him.

  “I still might not,” he replied.

  I looked at him with a rather irritated pity. I could sense, after a fashion, what he was driving at. He was so much the typical introvert—dark of hair and face, long and lean—and his telepathic talent could do nothing but add to the miseries that come with introversion.

  “You’d better have something stronger,” I told him. I caught the bartender’s eye. “Two double whiskies, please.”

  “Make that three,” said a too-hearty voice. I looked around, saw that Tarrant, our Second Mate, had just come in.

  “Got tired of the same old stories at last?” I asked unkindly.

  “No,” he said. “But somebody had to go to find you two, and I was the most junior officer present, so . . .”

  “Who wants us?” I demanded. “And why?”

  “The Old Man wants you.” He lifted his glass. “Here’s to crime.”

  “What does he want us for?”

  “I don’t know. All that I know is this. Some meteor-pitted old bastard calling himself Captain Grimes came barging into the pub and demanded an audience with our lord and master. They retired to confer privily. Shortly thereafter the call for all hands to battle stations went out.”

  “Grimes . . .” I said slowly. “The name rings a bell. I seem to remember that when we handed the old Eppy Swan over somebody mentioned that Captain Grimes, the Chief Superintendent for Rim Runners, was away on Thule.”

  “Could be,” admitted Tarrant. “He has the look of a chairborne spaceman. In which case we’ll have another drink. It’s bad enough having to run to the beck and call of our own Supers without having to keep those belonging to a tuppenny ha’penny concern like Rim Runners happy.”

  We had another drink, and another. After the third whisky Peter’s gloom seemed to be evaporating slightly, so he ordered a fourth one. The Second Mate and I each ordered another round, after which we thought that we had better discover what was cooking. We walked rather unsteadily into the untidy street, hailed a ground cab and were driven back to the Rimrock House.

  We found them all waiting for us in the Lounge—the Old Man and the rest of the officers, the chunky little man whose appearance justified Tarrant’s description of him as a “meteor-pitted old bastard.”

  “Sir,” said the Old Man stiffly, “here are my Third Officer, Mr. Wilberforce, and my Psionic Radio Officer, Mr. Morris. I have no doubt that they will show as little enthusiasm for your project as any of my other officers. Yours is essentially a Rim World undertaking, and should be carried out by Rim World personnel.”

  “They can decide, sir,” said Captain Grimes. “You have told me that these officers have no close ties on Earth or elsewhere; it is possible that they may find the proposition attractive. And, as I have already told you, we guarantee repatriation.”

  “What is it all about, anyhow?” asked Tarrant.

  “Sit down, gentlemen,” said Grimes, “and I’ll tell you.” While we were finding chairs he filled and lit a foul pipe. “I’ll have to recapitulate for your benefit; I hope that the rest of you don’t object.

  “Well, as you are no doubt aware, we of the Rim Worlds consider ourselves the orphans of the Galaxy. You know why these planets were colonised in the first instance—the Central Government of those days feared an alien invasion sweeping in from outside the Galaxy. The general idea was to set up a huge ring of garrisoned planets, a fortified perimeter. That idea has died over the years and, as a result, only a very small arc of the Rim has been explored, even.

  “We of the Rim Worlds wish to survive as a separate, independent entity. Starved as we are of trade and shipping we have little chance of surviving at all. So it has been decided that we take our own steps, in our own way, to achieve this end.

  “You’ve heard, of course, of the odd pieces of wreckage that come drifting in, from time to time, from somewhere. It was such flotsam that first gave the Central Government the idea that there might be an invasion from some other galaxy. Now, we don’t think that those odd bits and pieces ever did come from outside. We think that there are inhabited planets all around the rim, and that advantageous trade would be possible with them.

  “For years we’ve been trying to persuade the brass hats of the Survey Service to carry out a systematic exploration, but the answer’s always the same. They haven’t the ships, or they haven’t the men, or they haven’t the money. So, at last, we have decided to carry out our own exploration. Your old ship, Epsilon Pavonis, is being fitted out for the job. She’s being renamed, by the way—Faraway Quest. . .”

  “And what,” asked Tarrant, “has this to do with us?”

  Captain Grimes hesitated, seemed almost embarrassed. “Frankly,” he said, “the trouble is this. We don’t seem to breed spacemen, real spacemen, on the Rim Worlds. Puddle jumpers, that’s all they are. They’ll venture as far as Ultimo, or Thule, or the Shakespearean Sector, but they just aren’t keen to fare any further afield . . .”

  “There’s too much fear on these worlds,” said Peter Morris suddenly. “That’s the trouble. Fear of the cold and the dark and the emptiness . . .”

  Grimes looked at him. “Of course,” he said, “you’re the telepath . . .”

  “Yes, I’m the telepath. But you don’t need to be any kind of an Esper to sense the fear.”

  “All right, then,” said Grimes. “My own boys are just plain scared to venture so much as a single lightyear beyond the trade routes. But I’ve got a Master for Faraway Quest—myself. I’ve a Purser, and Chief and Second Mannschenn Drive Engineers, and one Rocket Engineer. I’ve a Chief Officer and a Surgeon-cum-Bio-Chemist, and an Electronic Radio Officer. All of us are from the Centre, none of us was born out here, on the Rim. But this is a survey job, and I shall need a well-manned ship.

  “I can promise any of you who volunteer double your current rates of pay. I can promise you repatriation when the job is over, to any part of the Galaxy.”

  “Most of us,” said our Captain, “have homes and families waiting for us. We’ve been out for too long now.”

  “You’re sure that there are inhabited worlds out along the Rim?” asked Peter. “What of their people?”


  “Purple octopi for all I know,” replied Grimes.

  “But there’s a chance, just a chance, that they might be humanoid, or even human?” insisted the Psionic Radio Officer.

  “Yes, there’s a chance. Given a near infinitude of habitable worlds and an infinitude of time for evolution to take its course, then anything is possible.”

  “The purple octopi are more probable,” I said.

  “Perhaps,” almost whispered Peter. “Perhaps . . . But I have limited, very limited, premonitory powers, and I have a definite feeling that. . .”

  “That what?” I asked.

  “Oh, never mind.” To Grimes he said, “I take it that you can use a P.R.O., Captain?”

  “That I can,” declared Grimes heartily.

  I sighed. “You offer about double the pay,” I said. “I’m Third Officer in the Commission’s fleet as you know. If I come with you as Second, do I get twice the Commission’s rate for that rank?”

  “You do.”

  “Count me in,” I said.

  “You must be mad,” said Tarrant. “Both of you—but Wilberforce is less mad than Morris. After all, he’s doing it for money. What are you doing it for, Crystal Gazer?”

  “Mind your own business!” he snapped.